Category: linux

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fsck paranoid?

Some random hints :

  1. Ensure the final field / column in /etc/fstab is non-zero for other filesystems you have mounted; if it’s 0 then fsck will never run on them.
  2. fsck -Cccy /dev/blah1 does a read-write (non-destructive test). Works well on SSDs 🙂
Example from /etc/fstab:
/dev/md0  /mount/point ext3 defaults 0 2

When looking at the various boxes we have in our office, I found one server had the following (run dumpe2fs /dev/whatever1):

  • Mount count:              62
  • Maximum mount count:      39
  • Last checked:             Wed Jul  9 16:09:17 2008
  • Next check after:         Mon Jan  5 15:09:17 2009
Today is 8th June 2012. Ooops.

Interestingly when I did run fsck on it, there were no errors. Is perhaps the default ext3 setting of checking every 20-30 mounts too paranoid?  It’s certainly very painful running fsck on large ‘rotating’ volumes – waiting over an hour for a server to come up is not fun.

 

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Sponge – Shell command

Today, my sed kung-foo seemed to be lacking, so I ended up having to split the sed command over a zillion lines…

Normally I’d do something like :

sed 's/foo/bar/g' tmp.txt > tmp2.txt
sed 's/fo2/blah/g' tmp2.txt > tmp3.txt

But this obviously gets painful after a time, a different approach would be to use sponge where we can do :

sed 's/foo/bar/g' tmp.txt | sponge tmp.txt
sed 's/fo2/blah/g' tmp.txt | sponge tmp.txt

Whereby ‘sponge’ soaks up standard input and when there’s no more, opens the output file. This gets around the obvious problem that :

sed 's/foo/bar/g' tmp.txt > tmp.txt

doesn’t work because the shell opens (and overwrites) tmp.txt  before sed’s had a chance to do anything.

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exim + spamassassin subject rewriting on symbiosis

One customer of mine has an Bytemark Symbiosis based exim mailserver which uses SpamAssassin. It works pretty well – however the :

rewrite_header Subject *****SPAM*****

directive in spamassassin (/etc/spamassassin/local.cf) seemed to be being ignored – and the only effect of the mail being classified as spam is/was a couple of additional headers added (X-Spam-Status: spam). For the customer in question this wasn’t of much use – as they’re reasonably non-technical and probably couldn’t create a client side mail filter. And they also thought the spamfiltering wasn’t working.

I found adding the following to /etc/exim4/system_filter results in the subject being appropriately modified :

if $h_X-Spam-Status: contains "spam"
then
    headers add "Old-Subject: $h_subject"
    headers remove "Subject"
    headers add "Subject: *** SPAM *** $h_old-subject"
    headers remove "Old-Subject"
endif

And if you want to tag virus-ey emails … add this in as well : 

# X-Anti-Virus: infected
if $h_X-Anti-Virus: contains "infected"
then
    headers add "Old-Subject: $h_subject"
    headers remove "Subject"
    headers add "Subject: *** VIRUS *** $h_old-subject"
    headers remove "Old-Subject"
endif

Seeing as how that took about 2 hours to figure out – hopefully this will be of use to others.

I started looking at SpamAssassin and wondering why IT wasn’t doing it… I still don’t know why – but assume it’s an Exim ‘feature’.

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netstat –tcp -lp output not showing a process id

I often use ‘netstat –tcp -lpn’ to display a list of open ports on a server – so i can check things aren’t listening where they shouldn’t be (e.g. MySQL accepting connections from the world) and so on. Obviously I firewall boxes; but I like to have a reasonable default incase the firewall decides to flush itself randomly or whatever.

Anyway, I ran ‘netstat –tcp -lpn’ and saw something like the following :

tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:3306          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3355/mysqld     
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:54283           0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -               
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:111             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1940/portmap

Now ‘mysqld’ looks OK – and portmap does (well, I need it on this box). But what on earth was listening on port 54283, and why is there no process name/pid attached to it?

After lots of rummaging, and paranoia where I thought perhaps the box had been rooted, I discovered it was from an NFS mount (which explains the lack of a pid, as it’s kernel based).

lsof -i tcp:54283

Didn’t help either. Unmounting the NFS filesystem did identify the problem – and the entry went away.

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Checking varnish configuration syntax

If you’ve updated your varnish server’s configuration, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent of ‘apachectl configtest’ for it, but you can do :

varnishd -C -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl

If everything is correct, varnish will then dump out the generated configuration. Otherwise you’ll get an error message pointing you to a specific line number.

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yum changelog (Want to know what you’re about to upgrade on CentOS/RHEL?)

Want to see what changes you’re about to apply when doing a ‘yum update’ ? Similar-ish to how ‘apt-listchanges’ works…

On CentOS 5.6, try :

  • yum install yum-changelog python-dateutil

Note, python-dateutil seems to be an unmarked dependency – i.e. you get an error message like : “Dateutil module not available, so can’t parse dates” when trying to run ‘yum changelog all updates’.

Note, /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/changelog.conf (but this didn’t seem to need changing to me).

Now you can do :

  • yum changelog all updates
  • yum changelog all mysql-server (or whatever package you’re interested in).

 

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Useful settings for history recording in bash (/etc/profile or ~/.bashrc)

shopt -s histappend
shopt -s checkwinsize
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace
export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S  '
export EDITOR=vim

histappend: don’t overwrite .bash_history files on each logout; then when someone logs into the server, and messes something up, there’s a vague chance you’ll see what they did. Your history file will obviously grow to be quite big – but suppression of duplicates helps. Mine’s only 900kb after 7 months.

checkwinsize: check the window size after each command, might help some braindead programs cope with you resizing their windows, I guess.

HISTCONTROL: suppress duplicates, ignore spaces

HISTTIMEFORMAT: record a timestamp against each history entry; run ‘history’ to see an example of it’s output…

EDITOR: why would you not use vim?